Even though there are great advancements made in the image display technologies such that scanning images can be displayed with higher resolutions and can be viewed from different angles and zooming in and out at different zooming proportions to perform more accurate diagnoses. However, the user interface for displaying and viewing the medical images are still limited by the requirement to toggle back and forth between the original image and the zoomed images. These toggle back and forth operations are required when a user needs to view zoomed image of different areas of the original image. Such operations generally require an image display user to enter many key stokes. Therefore, it becomes inconvenient for a viewer who needs to view scanned images in different sizes.
In a conventional ultrasound imaging system, there is a dedicated ‘Zoom’ key in the user interface keyboard to toggle the display in between the original (un-zoomed) image and the zoom-in image. When acquiring a real time ultrasound 2-D image on the screen, the user can press the ‘Zoom’ key to highlight a graphic boarder called Zoom Region Of Interest (ZROI) for zooming the image, and then use the trackball or arrow key to pan the ZROI on the original un-zoom screen, and press the ‘Zoom’ key one more time to display the zoom-in image. When the user wants to pan the ZROI to another portion of the display, he/she needs to press the Zoom key again to go back to the original un-zoom image and then pan the zoom box, and press the zoom key again to see the zoom-in image.
For these reasons, a need still exists for those of ordinary skill in the art to provide an improved method and system for medical image display. Specifically, it is desirable to provide an improved user interface to simplify the operations when a user of the image display system needs to magnify different areas in an image. Specifically, it is desirable that the number of key strokes can be reduced by automating toggles of display images between the ZROI zoomed-in display and the “zoomed-out” global images such that a user does not have to enter so many key strokes to change from one mode of viewing and display to another.